(a) Field of the Invention
Exemplary embodiments of the invention relate to a display device and a driving method thereof. More particularly, exemplary embodiments of the invention relate to a display device and a driving method thereof with reduced size of a non-display area at a lower cost.
(b) Description of the Related Art
A display device is widely used for a computer monitor, a television and a mobile phone, for example. The display device includes a cathode ray tube display device, a liquid crystal display and a plasma display device, for example.
The display device typically includes a graphics processing unit (“GPU”), a display panel and a signal controller. The GPU transmits image data to be displayed to the display panel to the signal controller, and the signal controller generates and transmits a control signal and transmits along with the image data to the display panel to drive the display panel and to thereby drive the display device.
The image displayed on the display panel may be classified into a still image and a motion picture. The display panel typically displays several frames per second. In the display device, when the image data included in each frame are the same, the still image is displayed. Further, when the image data included in each frame are different, the motion picture is displayed.
In the display device, even when the motion picture and the still image are displayed on the display panel, the signal controller receives the same image data from the graphics processing unit every frame, such that the power consumption increases.
Recently, researches on reducing the power consumption of the display device have been attempted. As one of the researches on reducing the power consumption of the display device, a method in which image data of an image is stored in a frame memory by including the frame memory to the signal controller, and the stored image data is provided to the display panel while displaying the still image has been proposed. This is called a panel self-refresh (“PSR”) mode, and since the image data is not transmitted from the graphics processing unit while displaying the still image, the graphics processing unit is inactivated such that power consumption may be reduced.
However, in such a method where the signal controller is driven in the PSR mode, the manufacturing cost is increased due to the addition of the frame memory as a constituent element and the size of the non-display area, where an image is not displayed, is increased.